On 24 October, the festival in which the Egyptians celebrated the death of their god Osiris, Hadrian’s lover Antinous mysteriously drowned in the Nile. Did he kill himself? Did Hadrian or the Egyptians sacrifice him? Was it an accident? The usually inscrutable Hadrian was heartbroken, deifying the boy as Osiris, founding a town Antinopolis and an Antinous cult, spreading statues of his graceful face and magnificent physique all over the Mediterranean.
On his way home from Egypt, Hadrian passed through Jerusalem, where he probably ploughed the furrow around the city-limits of Aelia Capitolina. Outraged by the repression, the paganization of Jerusalem and the obligatory nudes of the boy Antinous, the Jews stashed weapons and prepared underground complexes in the Judaean hills.
Once Hadrian was safely on his way, a mysterious leader known as the Prince of Israel launched the most terrible of the Jewish wars.3
SIMON BAR KOCHBA: THE SON OF THE STAR
‘At first the Romans took no account of the Jews,’ but this time the Jews were well prepared under one capable commander, Simon bar Kochba, self-declared Prince of Israel and Son of the Star, the same mystical sign of kingship that marked the birth of Jesus, prophesied in Numbers: ‘There shall come forth a star out of Jacob, and a sceptre shall rise out of Israel and shall smite Moab.’ Many hailed him as the new David. ‘This is the King Messiah,’ insisted the respected rabbi Akiba (in the fourth-century Talmud), but not everyone agreed. ‘Grass will sprout on your chin, Akiba,’ answered another rabbi, ‘and the Son of David will still not have appeared.’ Kochba’s real name was bar Kosiba; sceptics punned that he was bar Koziba, the Son of the Lie.
Simon swiftly defeated the Roman governor and his two legions. His orders, discovered in a Judaean cave, reveal his harsh competence: ‘I shall deal with the Romans’ – and he did. He wiped out an entire legion. ‘He caught missiles on his knee then hurled them back and killed some of the enemy.’ The prince tolerated no dissent: ‘Simon bar Kosiba to Yehonatan and Masabala. Let all men from Tekoa and other places who are with you, be sent to me without delay. And if you shall not send them, you shall be punished.’ A religious zealot, he supposedly ‘ordered Christians to be punished severely if they did not deny Jesus was the Messiah’, according to Justin, a contemporary Christian. He ‘killed the Christians when they refused to help him against the Romans’, added a Christian, Eusebius, writing much later. ‘The man was murderous and a bandit but relied on his name, as if dealing with slaves, and claimed to be a giver of light.’ He was said to have tested his fighters’ dedication by asking each to cut off a finger.
The Son of the Star ruled his State of Israel from the fort of Herodium, just south of Jerusalem: his coins announced ‘Year One: The Redemption of Israel’. But did he rededicate the Temple and restore the sacrifice? His coins boasted ‘For the Freedom of Jerusalem’, and were emblazoned with the Temple, but none of his coins have been found in Jerusalem. Appian wrote that Hadrian, like Titus, destroyed Jerusalem, implying that there was something to demolish, and the rebels, sweeping all before them, would surely have besieged the Tenth Legion in the Citadel and worshipped on the Temple Mount if they had had the chance, but we do not know if they did.
Hadrian hastened back to Judaea, summoned his best commander Julius Severus all the way from Britain, and mustered seven or even twelve legions who ‘moved out against the Jews, treating their madness without mercy,’ according to Cassius Dio, one of the few historians of this obscure war. ‘He destroyed in heaps thousands of men, women and children and under the law of war enslaved the land.’ When Severus arrived, he adopted Jewish tactics, ‘cutting off small groups, depriving them of their food and shutting them in’ so that he could ‘crush and exterminate them’. As the Romans closed in, bar Kochba needed severe threats to enforce discipline: ‘If you maltreat the Galileans with you,’ he told a lieutenant, ‘I will put fetters on your feet as I did to ben Aphlul!’
The Jews retreated to the caves of Judaea, which is why Simon’s letters and their poignant belongings have been found there. These refugees and warriors carried keys to their abandoned houses, the consolation of those doomed never to return, and their luxuries – a glass plate, a vanity mirror in a leather case, a wooden jewellery box, an incense shovel. There, they perished, for the possessions lie beside their bones. Their fragmented letters record the terse semaphores of catastrophe: ‘Till the end … they have no hope … my brothers in the south … these were lost by the sword …’
The Romans moved in on bar Kochba’s last fortress, Betar, 6 miles south of Jerusalem. Simon himself died in the last stand at Betar, with a snake around his neck according to Jewish legend. ‘Bring his body to me!’ said Hadrian, and was impressed by the head and the snake. ‘If God had not slain him, who would have overcome him?’ Hadrian had probably already returned to Rome but, either way, he wreaked an almost genocidal vengeance.
‘Very few survived,’ wrote Cassius Dio. ‘Fifty of their outposts and 985 villages were razed to the ground. 585,000 were killed in battles’ and many more by ‘starvation, disease and fire’. Seventy-five known Jewish settlements simply vanished. So many Jews were enslaved that at the Hebron slave market they fetched less than a horse. Jews continued to live in the countryside, but Judaea itself never recovered from Hadrian’s ravages. Hadrian not only enforced the ban on circumcision but banned the Jews from even approaching Aelia, on pain of death. Jerusalem had vanished. Hadrian wiped Judaea off the map, deliberately renaming it Palaestina, after the Jews’ ancient enemies, the Philistines.
Hadrian received acclamation as imperator, but this time there was no Triumph: the emperor was tarnished and exhausted by his losses in Judaea. When he reported to the Senate, he was unable to give the usual reassurance, ‘I am well, and so is the army.’ Suffering from the arteriosclerosis (flagged by the split earlobes depicted on his statues), swollen with dropsy, Hadrian killed any possible successors, even his ninety-year-old brother-in-law, who cursed him: ‘May he long for death but be unable to die.’ The curse came true: unable to die, Hadrian tried to kill himself. But no autocrat has ever written as wittily and wistfully about death as Hadrian:
Little soul, little wanderer, little charmer,
Body’s guest and companion,
To what places will you set out for now?
To darkling, cold and gloomy ones —
And you won’t be making your usual jokes.
When he eventually died – ‘hated by all’ – the Senate refused to deify him. Jewish literature never mentions Hadrian without adding, ‘May his bones rot in hell!’
His successor, Antoninus Pius, slightly relaxed the persecution of Jews, allowing circumcision again, but Antoninus’ statue joined Hadrian’s on the Temple Mount* to emphasize that the Temple would never be rebuilt. The Christians, now fully separated from the Jews, could not help but crow. ‘The House of Sanctuary’, wrote the Christian Justin to Antoninus, ‘has become a curse, and the glory which our fathers blessed is burned with fire.’ Unfortunately for the Jews, the settled politics of the empire for the rest of the century discouraged any change in Hadrian’s policy.
Aelia Capitolina was a minor Roman colony of 10,000, without walls, just two-fifths of its former size, extending only from today’s Damascus Gate to the Gate of the Chain, with two forums, the Temple of Jupiter on the site of Golgotha, two thermal baths, a theatre, a nymphaeum (statues of nymphs around pools) and an amphitheatre, all decorated with colonnades, tetrapylons and statues, including a large one of the Tenth Legion’s very unkosher boar. Gradually the Tenth Legion was moved away from Jerusalem as the Jews, no longer a threat, came to be regarded more as an irritant. When the emperor Marcus Aurelius passed through on his way to Egypt, ‘being often disgusted with the malodorous and disorderly Jews’, he jokingly compared them to other rebellious tribes: ‘Oh Quadi, oh Samaritans, at last I have found a people more unruly than you!’ Jerusalem had no natural industries except holiness – and the absence of the Tenth Legion must have made her eve
n more of a backwater.
When the peaceful succession in Rome ended in civil war in 193, the Jews, who now lived mainly in Galilee and around the Mediterranean coast, began to stir, either fighting their local enemies the Samaritans or perhaps rising in support of the ultimate winner of the throne, Septimus Severus. This led to a softening of anti-Jewish policy: the new emperor and his son Caracalla visited Aelia in 201 and seem to have met the Jewish leader, Judah haNasi, known as ‘the Prince’. When Caracalla succeeded to the throne, he rewarded Judah with estates in the Golan and Lydda (near Jerusalem) and with the hereditary power to adjudicate religious disputes and set the calendar, recognizing him as the community leader – the Patriarch of the Jews.
The wealthy Judah, who seems to have combined rabbinical scholarship with aristocratic luxury, held court in Galilee with a bodyguard of Goths while he compiled the Mishnah, the oral traditions of post-Temple Judaism. Thanks to Judah’s imperial connections, and to the passing of time, Jews were allowed, after bribing the garrison, to pray opposite the ruined Temple on the Mount of Olives or in the Kidron Valley. There, they believed, the shekinah – the holy spirit – resided. It is said that Judah won permission for a small ‘holy community’ of Jews to live in Jerusalem, praying in the one synagogue on today’s Mount Zion. Nonetheless, the Severan emperors never reconsidered Hadrian’s policy.
Yet the Jewish longing for Jerusalem never faltered. Wherever they lived in the following centuries, Jews prayed three times a day: ‘May it be your will that the Temple be rebuilt soon in our days.’ In the Mishnah, they compiled every detail of Temple ritual, ready for its restoration. ‘A woman may put on all her ornaments,’ instructed the Tosefta, another compilation of oral traditions, ‘but should leave out one small thing in remembrance of Jerusalem.’ The Passover seder dinner ended with the words: ‘Next Year in Jerusalem’. If they ever approached Jerusalem, they devised a ritual of rending their garments on catching sight of the ruined city. Even Jews who lived far away wanted to be buried close to the Temple so that they would be the first to rise again on Judgement Day. Thus began the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives.
There was every chance that the Temple would be rebuilt – indeed it had been before and very nearly was again. While the Jews were still formally banned from Jerusalem, it was now the Christians who were seen as the clear and present danger to Rome.4
From 235, the empire suffered a thirty-year crisis, shattered from inside and out. In the east, a vigorous new Persian empire, replacing Parthia, challenged the Romans. During the crisis, the Roman emperors blamed the Christians for being atheists who refused to sacrifice to their gods and savagely persecuted them, even though Christianity was not so much a single religion as a bundle of different traditions.* But Christians agreed on the basics: redemption and life after death for those saved by Jesus Christ, confirming the ancient Jewish prophecies which they had commandeered and adopted as their own. Their founder had been killed by the Romans as a rebel, but the Christians rebranded themselves as a faith hostile to the Jews, not to the Romans. Hence Rome became their holy city; most Christians in Palestine lived in Caesarea on the coast; Jerusalem became‘the heavenly city’, while the actual place,Aelia, was just anobscure town where Jesus had died. Yet local Christians kept alive the tradition of the site of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, now buried under Hadrian’s Temple of Jupiter, even creeping inside to pray and scratch graffiti.*
At Rome’s nadir in 260, the Persians captured the emperor (who was forced to drink molten gold, and was then gutted and stuffed with straw) while the entire East, including the unwalled town of Aelia, was lost to a short-lived Palmyran empire led by a young woman, Zenobia. But within twelve years Rome had recovered the East. At the end of the century, the emperor Diocletian successfully restored Roman power and revived the worship of the old gods. But the Christians seemed to be undermining this resurgence. In 299, Diocletian was sacrificing to the gods at a parade in Syria when some Christian soldiers made the sign of the cross, at which the pagan diviners declared that the divination had failed. When Diocletian’s palace burned down, he blamed the Christians and unleashed a vicious persecution, martyring Christians, burning their books, destroying their churches.
When Diocletian abdicated in 305, dividing the empire, Galerius, new emperor of the East, intensified the butchery of Christians by axe, roasting and mutilation. But the emperor of the West was Constantius Chlorus, a sturdy Illyrian soldier, who assumed the purple in York. Already ill, he died soon afterwards but in July 306 the British legions hailed his young son, Constantine, as emperor. It would take him fifteen years to conquer first the West and then the East, but Constantine, like King David, would change the history of the world and the fate of Jerusalem with a single decision.5
PART THREE
CHRISTIANITY
Jerusalem – it is the city of the great King.
Jesus, St Matthew, 5.35
O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and stonest them which are sent unto thee.
Jesus, St Matthew, 23.37
Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.
Jesus, St John, 2.19
As Judaea is exalted above all other provinces so is this city exalted above all Judaea.
St Jerome, Epistles
Jerusalem is now made a place of resort from all parts of the world, and there is such a throng of pilgrims of both sexes that all temptation is here collected together.
St Jerome, Epistles
15
THE APOGEE OF BYZANTIUM
312–518 AD
CONSTANTINE THE GREAT: CHRIST, GOD OF VICTORY
In 312, Constantine invaded Italy and attacked his rival Maxentius just outside Rome. The night before battle, Constantine saw before him ‘in the sky the sign of a cross of light’ superimposed on the sun with the slogan: ‘By this sign you will conquer!’ So he emblazoned the shields of his soldiers with the Chi-Rho symbol, the first two letters of ‘Christ’ in Greek. The next day at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, he won the West. In this age of auguries and visions, Constantine believed he owed his power to the Christian ‘Supreme God’.
Constantine was a rough soldier, a holy visionary, a murderous autocrat and a political showman who slashed his way to power but, once at the pinnacle of human supremacy, he envisioned an empire unified under one religion, one emperor. He was a bundle of contradictions – he was bullnecked, aquiline-nosed and his paranoia often exploded in the sudden killing of friends and family. He wore his hair shoulder-length, sported gaudy bracelets and bejewelled robes, and relished the pageantry of power, the debates of philosophers and bishops and schemes of architectural beauty and religious boldness. No one knows why he embraced Christianity at that moment, though, like many brutally confident men, he adored his mother, Helena, and she was an early convert. If his personal conversion was as dramatic as Paul’s on the road to Damascus, his political embrace of Christianity was gradual. Most importantly, Christ had delivered victory in battle, and that was a language that Constantine understood: Christ the Lamb became the god of victory. Not that Constantine was in any way lamb-like himself: he soon presented himself as the Equal of the Apostles. There was nothing remarkable in his promotion of himself as a military commander with divine protection. Roman emperors, like Greek kings, always identified themselves with divine patrons. Constantine’s own father revered the Unconquered Sun, a step towards monotheism. But the choice of the Christ was not inevitable – it depended purely on Constantine’s personal whim. In 312, Manichaeanism and Mithraism were no less popular than Christianity. Constantine could just as easily have chosen one of these – and Europe might today be Mithraistic or Manichaean.*
In 313, Constantine and the Eastern emperor Licinius granted toleration and privileges to the Christians in their Edict of Milan. But it was only in 324 that Constantine, now aged fifty-one, defeated Licinius to unite the empire. He tried to impose Christian chastity across his domains and banned pagan sa
crifices, sacred prostitution, religious orgies, and gladiatorial shows, replacing them with chariot-racing. That year, he moved his capital eastwards, founding his Second Rome on the site of a Greek town called Byzantium on the Bosphorus, a gateway between Europe and Asia. This soon became known as Constantinople with its own patriarch, who now joined the bishop of Rome and the patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch as the ruling powers of Christianity. The new faith suited Constantine’s new style of kingship. Christianity had from the earliest days of James, Overseer of Jerusalem, developed a hierarchy of elders (presbyteroi) and overseers / bishops (episkopoi)in charge of regional dioceses. Constantine saw that Christianity, with its hierarchy, paralleled the organization of the Roman empire: there would be one emperor, one state, one faith.
Yet he had no sooner bound his supremacy to his imperial religion than he discovered that Christianity was divided: the Gospels were vague about Jesus’ nature and his relationship to God. Was Jesus a man with some divine characteristics or God inhabiting the body of a man? Now that the Church was established, Christology became paramount, more important than life itself, for the right definition of Christ would decide whether a man would achieve salvation and enter heaven. In our secular era, the debates on nuclear disarmament or global warming are the closest equivalents in their passion and intensity. Christianity now became a mass religion in an age of fanatical faith and these questions were debated in the streets as well as in the palaces of the empire. When Arius, an Alexandrian priest who preached to huge crowds using popular jingles, argued that Jesus was subordinate to God and therefore more human than divine, this upset the many who regarded Christ as more God than man. When the local governor tried to suppress Arius, his followers rioted in Alexandria.